http://www.momsrising.org/It's an activist organization seeking a variety of improvements to social policy in the U.S., including paid maternity/parental leave, subsidized child care, an improvement to the minimum wage, an end to the wage gap (not just between women and men, but between moms and non-moms) universal health care for children, etc, etc.
One fact I found especially telling: the U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate in the developed world. Comparing countries that have paid maternity leaves reveals that the better the parental benefits, the lower the infant mortality. That's a direct correlation, and the U.S. is scraping the bottom of the barrel for developed nations (tied with Latvia.)
Another: 50% of bankruptcies in 2001 were related to a medical problem. Most of them were for people who had what were considered good benefits plans, and were still working their butts off to pay the co-pays, drug costs, and other assorted drains on finances. Many came to a head when the main wage-earner got sick enough that he/she couldn't work anymore - at which point, of course, the benefits went away.
So, those of you who are in the States and care about the health and well-being of families in the States, take a look.
EDIT: Piet checked the stats, and discovered there was a mistake (at least according to Wikipedia.) The U.S. has 6.5 infant deaths per 1000, and Latvia has 9.55. However, every single nation in Western Europe and every developed nation that I'm aware of has a lower stat than that; Cuba comes in at 6.33, Canada at 4.5, the countries of Western Europe all hover somewhere just above 4, and Singapore wins at 2.9, so the overall point still stands: the U.S. has a high infant mortality rate compared to its peers on the world stage. Here's the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mortality_rate ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}